Reality Splasher: Eldrazi In Your Modern Deck

Modern has always been a creature format. That’s why, despite a lull in play last year, nobody’s ever doubted Path to Exile as a perennial staple. And why dumb beaters like Tarmogoyf find their way to the top tables in the face of Goryo’s Vengeance and Ad Nauseam. Cheap, large bodies command a premium in Modern, and Oath of the Gatewatch has the most efficient threats we’ve seen since Siege Rhino.

I think the Oath Eldrazi have what it takes to reach Modern mainstay status. This article explores some of the possibilities for them in non-Eldrazi archetypes.

Eldrazi Splashing 101

Why Splash Eldrazi?

With so many great creatures in Modern, we need some convincing reasons to splash Eldrazi into existing archetypes. Let’s consider the creatures printed in Oath of the Gatewatch.

Matter Reshaper: Kitchen Finks-tier value in any color. 3/2 stats trade with almost every one- or two-drop creature in Modern not named Tarmogoyf. Reshaper is cantripping removal against aggro, and a clock that sucks to kill against midrange. In my games with him, I’m always happy to see him die, and when he lives he’s still attacking for three every turn.

Opportunity Cost of Splashing

To quote Lil’ Jon and Oobie, “Nothing’s Free.” Opportunity cost refers to the things we give up to include Eldrazi in our decks.

For one, we have to include nonbasic, colorless-producing lands. Many decks do this anyway, which makes splashing Eldrazi relatively painless. Ghost Quarter and Tectonic Edge now see more widespread use than ever to combat big mana boogeyman Tron, and to gracefully answer manlands. Speaking of manlands, Mutavault and Blinkmoth Nexus fit into a variety of Modern decks and tap for colorless themselves. So do utility options like Gavony Township, Vault of the Archangel, and Sea Gate Wreckage. In this highly aggressive metagame, I can even see Quicksand getting some love.

Color-fixing lands provide an attractive alternative to lands with effects. Filter lands like Twilight Mire, Mystic Gate, and Fetid Heath allow a potent marriage of colorless-specific Eldrazi to color-intensive bombs like Cryptic Command. The classically mediocre pain lands, including Karplusan Forest and Shivan Reef, suddenly become phenomenal in a deck with Eldrazi beaters – they now tap for three different types of mana.

Since the Eldrazi rely on nonbasic, colorless-producing lands, including them makes us softer to Blood Moon. A resolved Moon makes casting Thought-Knot Seer a nightmare, as no archetypes outside of dedicated Eldrazi can or should run mainboard Wastes (which is pretty difficult to fetch). Colorless-producing mana rocks like Talisman of Dominance are rare/bad enough in this format that I wouldn’t count on ever putting colorless-specific Eldrazi on the stack with a Moon in play.

Prime Candidates

With the pros and cons of splashing colorless in mind, let’s see if any existing Modern decks could provide a nice home for our new Eldrazi friends. Looking over the Modern Nexus Top Decks page, over fifteen decks can already splash them without much trouble. It’s another question whether they want Eldrazi – Affinity and Merfolk, for example, would never compromise their synergistic creature suites for a 4/4 Thoughtseize. These other decks show more promise:

The last four decks on the list are the most natural fit for colorless Eldrazi. These disruptive aggro decks walk the line between goodstuff and synergy, and back up their creatures with a hearty serving of colorless lands. Collected Company into Matter Reshaper seems really mean against value decks, and Thought-Knot gives the Chord of Calling toolbox an instant-speed, searchable Thoughtseize. BW Tokens might not mind giving Pyroclasm-proof legs to one of their discard spells. But right now, it seems to me that Leonin Arbiter decks are best poised to assimilate the Eldrazi, since their color requirements are low enough to include Eldrazi Temple.

El Drizzly Bears

Am I trying to say “the rain” in Spanish? Or did I have Snoop Dogg open an Oath of the Gatewatch booster pack? Wrong on both counts! That’s just my punny name for WCx Hatebears. As Ghost Quarter positions itself among Modern’s strongest mana denial cards, it makes sense the best Quarter deck would enjoy a resurgence. Splashing green or black into the Death and Taxes skeleton gives us a range of possible options.

This deck has a few things going for it. As with traditional Hatebears, Aether Vial lets us run a conservative number of lands and still deploy threats rapidly. In lieu of a Vial, Hierarch does a passable impression while buffing our attackers. I’ve always shied away from Vial decks in Modern because they’re so slow without the artifact. Hierarch’s presence makes me much more comfortable. This might not be news to most of you, but I’m not one to generally mess around with this type of creature deck: exalted on a mana dork is crazy!

Speaking of which, Eldrazi Displacer is an Oath creature we haven’t discussed yet, for the reason that he boasts limited applications outside of enters-the-battlefield-based decks like Death and Taxes/Hatebears. In those decks, however, he really shines. Here, he resets Kitchen Finks at will, buys back endless cards from the graveyard with Eternal Witness, and casts instant-speed, reverse-Clique effects with Thought-Knot Seer. Blinking also proves powerful without a 187 effect. Displacer saves our threats from removal and can even target our opponent’s creatures. Since targets re-enter the battlefield tapped, Displacer gives our beaters psuedo-evasion, tapping down as many blockers as we have 2C for. On the defensive, he removes attackers from combat and prevents pump effects and auras from resolving. At three mana, he’s easy to Vial in and even easier to hardcast off a Temple. The only downside to this creature is his weakness to Lightning Bolt, but opponents frequently have a myriad of juicy targets to choose from in this deck. To Bolt the Displacer, they’ll have needed not to Bolt the Hierarch, or the Arbiter.

Bolt still rules against creature decks like these, so we play Tarmogoyf ourselves. Goyf is the best insurance policy for dead dorks and Cat Clerics alike. He combines with Thought-Knot Seer to bring some formidable beats to the red zone, and comes down off a Vial to surprise-block an opponent’s 4/4.

Goyf grows to 6/7 in this deck if opponents find a way to remove Aether Vial. If not, Oath of Nissa buffs him in multiples, all while finding extra copies of the creature. I lauded Oath of Nissa in my Cobra Moon article, but it performs even better in GW Drizzly, where it’s practically Ponder. The only cards it doesn’t find are Aether Vial, Path to Exile, and other Oaths. That means Oath can search for the other half of Arbiter/Quarter, or for the other half of Finks/Displacer. Or for a Thoughtseize effect. Or just for Tarmogoyfs.

While the deck’s core remains unchanged, BW trades the mana consistency of Hierarch and Oath of Nissa for a stronger aggro matchup and increased hand disruption.

The main draw to BW is the Militant/Tidehollow/Strangler package. Dryad Militant and Tidehollow Sculler exile an opponent’s cards, then Wasteland Strangler swoops in to process them and kill creatures. If the Strangler processes a card exiled with Sculler, opponents never get it back.

Eldrazi Displacer can blink these creatures to repeat the process, and works alone with either one. With a Strangler and some cards in exile from Dryad Militant, Displacer essentially casts Lightning Bolt on opposing creatures for 2C. The Tidehollow Sculler interaction proves a bit trickier, but allows Displacer to provide a late-game hard-lock with six mana available. First, Displacer blinks the Sculler for 2C, and our opponent gets his card back. Then, Sculler re-enters, and his ability triggers. In response, we can pay another 2C to blink Sculler again, triggering his second ability that gives our opponent his card. Sculler re-enters and takes a card, and his older enters-the-battlefield ability resolves, allowing us to exile a card for the rest of the game. Doing this trick every draw step denies opponents the chance to ever draw new cards.

Other Options

Space won’t permit me to include every viable white creature in these decks, so it’s fully possible I’ve omitted some crucial ones. Here are a few I left out.

Thalia, Guardian of Thraben: Neither build plays many noncreature spells, and Thalia punishes opponents that do. She also eats the ground up against Burn with first strike, and contributes to our Arbiter-rooted taxing plan.

Restoration Angel: I don’t want to clog the four-CMC slot in these mana-light decks, and Thought-Knot Seer seems much better to me than the Angel. Displacer already gives us a recurring version of her blink effect.

A Horrible Future

Given recent events, I should specify that I’m not referring here to the supposed state of Modern (which doesn’t worry me at all). I’m just quoting the flavor text of a card that hyper-enables players to splash aggressively costed, colorless-specific Eldrazi into any deck with low color requirements.

I don’t expect the largely untested lists in this article to win the Pro Tour this weekend. But I’ll bet my Not of This World playset the Eldrazi invasion of Modern won’t end with Relic of Progenitus decks.

Jordan is the copy and content editor at Modern Nexus. He has played Magic since 2003, and Modern since its inception. Jordan favors card efficiency over raw power and specializes in disruptive aggro strategies, always bringing tuned brews to events.

12 thoughts on “Reality Splasher: Eldrazi In Your Modern Deck”

Big fan of this article. The colorless splash is something that several Modern decks should consider, and doing so with Hatebears strikes me as very potent. I think that these decks go a little heavy on the Eldrazi (as you noted, Thalia very much needs to be in the deck, and you don’t really want to see multiples of Eldrazi Displacer), but that’s easy enough to test and adjust if necessary.

I would also posit that you don’t even need Eldrazi Temple to reap the benefits on some of these creatures if you don’t want to stretch your mana base too much – they’re plenty good when cast on curve or helped along by a mana dork (though of course the Temples help). Because of this, I find myself favoring the GW version. Oath of Nissa is certainly interesting (I don’t know if it will stick, but it’s worth a try), and Tarmogoyf seems a touch odd given all of the exile effects in the deck. That said, the Eternal Witness/Kitchen Finks/Matter Reshaper value chains along with Eldrazi Displacer make me think that this deck has a significant midrange component compared to “classic” Hatebears.

I would have really liked to have seen a mono-W version as well – the “classic” Death & Taxes (not to be confused with Hatebears) list is mono-W, and it would have allowed you to stuff more creatures that made your honorable mention list into the deck. It also makes for a less painful manabase.

I also prefer GW. Forgot to mention in the article, but Hierarch makes turn two Thought-Knot even more consistent. These lists are pretty raw, and mostly intended as a launch pad for other brewers. But I also think there’s some real potential here!

The Eldrazi additions along with Sea Gate Wreckage fix some of Death & Taxes’ major weaknesses (attrition decks grinding them out of resources and “big aggro” decks outclassing them on the ground) while providing effects (such as evasion, hand disruption, and repeatable blinking) they previously did not have access to. It remains to be seen whether I want all 4 of Matter Reshaper, but I think this is a strong place to start.

This is sweet! You don’t find the deck a little combo-heavy with Finks and Displacer? Have you thought about a singleton Thought-Knot to Chord into on your opponent’s draw step? Grove also does a great job casting him.

I haven’t really got around to testing alternatives in the Finks slot, looking heavily at what we saw over the weekend with the pro tour I think Finks offers up a solid body for chumping Eldrazi while maintaining a reasonable life total. I’m sticking to my GWru version with MD Magus of the Moon, Staticaster and Phantasmal Image for the time being and will probably focus on the changes I need to make there before dedicating more time to this version.

First thing to note, vialing a flickerwisp and then casting a strangler, processing the flickerwisp target and killing a dude makes me very happy everytime i pull it off. It doesn’t happen very often but when it happens, it feels so good!

The main issue i’ve had is the mana. Double white, white black and colorless mana costs are hard to balance when building the mana base, especially with 4x temples and 4x GQ. Blade splicer might be better than finks for this simple reason. Caves of koilos and fetid heath are also good steps toward fixing this.

I know this is late, but I just wanted to say that this article is the best you’ve ever written. Seriously. I keep coming back to it because cards like TKS and reality smasher are too good to not sleeve up.

Current metagame: 12/1 – 12/31

NOTE: Metagame % is calculated from the unweighted average of all MTGO leagues, paper T8s/T16s, and GP/PT/Open Day 2s in the date range. Data is tracked in the Top Decks page, which you can browse for more details.